1. I hate writing about Israel. The accusations of anti-semitism which necessarily go along with literally any criticism of that nation are gross enough, but even worse are the assholes who take my criticisms of the Israeli government as an invitation to actually be anti-semitic. They really do hate Jews, they really do think that every problem in the world is because of Jews and they post Jewish caricature memes and calls for genocide in the comments section on social media and it's incredibly gross and I hate it. But the Israeli government keeps committing war provocations and massacring Palestinians, so it's something I've got to talk about.

2. Anti-semitism (or whatever word you prefer to use for the pernicious mind virus which makes people think it's okay to promote hatred against Jewish people) is a very real thing that does exist, and I denounce it to the furthest possible extent. Anti-semitism is also a label that is used to bully the world into accepting war crimes, apartheid, oppression, and mass murder. Both of those things are true.

3. There were dozens of Palestinians killed and well above a thousand injured in the Gaza protests over the US moving its embassy to Jerusalem yesterday. I haven't found any report of so much as a single Israeli injury.The only way to spin this as the fault of the Palestinians is to dehumanize them, to attribute behaviors and motives to them that we all know are contrary to human nature. To paint them as subhuman orc-like creatures who are so crazy and evil that they will keep throwing themselves at a hail of bullets risking life and limb just to have some extremely remote chance of harming a Jewish person for no reason. This is clearly absurd. A little clear thinking and empathy goes a long way.

4. Trump could have prevented all this violence by doing what previous administrations had done and keeping the US embassy in Tel Aviv. Experts warned that this would happen. Trump ignored them. He is ultimately responsible for the mounting pile of corpses resulting from this provocation.

6. Any position on Israel that is determined by words allegedly spoken by dead men thousands of years ago is intrinsically invalid. Saying the Jewish people are more entitled to Israel than those who were living there seven decades ago because of some superstitious voodoo written in obsolete religious texts is not an argument. Religious freedom is important, and it's important to be able to believe whatever you like, but your beliefs do not legitimize the brutalization of other people. If you murder someone in the name of Allah, you have murdered someone. If you kill 58 people because you feel some ancient scripture entitles you to a particular section of dirt, you have killed 58 people. Your internal beliefs do not give you a free pass for your egregious actions upon others.

7. Israel is very dangerous and completely unsustainable, but its interests are aggressively promoted by powerful plutocrats and lobby groups. It's like if fracking was a place.

8. A nation that can't exist without nonstop war and violence is like a house that can't stand without nonstop construction work. If your house needs a large construction team working around the clock seven days a week to keep it from collapsing, you should probably either move or consider a new architectural design.

9. A nation that can't exist without nonstop war and violence is not a nation at all, (looking at you too America) it's a decades-long military operation with a few suburbs sprinkled on top. And that is exactly how Israel has functioned since its creation: as a nonstop disruption campaign that the post-World War Two western victors dropped on top of the Middle East just as humanity hit new heights of oil dependence. By 1967 Israel came within inches of a possible third world war with America's only rival superpower, the Soviet Union, and today we have Israel leading the charge in the western empire's regime change agendas against Iran and Syria. It's been a consistent pattern.

10. There's good conspiracy theory and there's bad conspiracy theory. People who say America controls Israel or Israel controls America are engaged in bad conspiracy theory. We don't live in a world where the lines between nations mean anything to those with real power; in reality "Israel" and "America" are both purely conceptual constructs which only exist to the extent that people believe in them. There is no actual "Israel" which can exert control over an actual "America", and vice versa. It isn't nations and governments pulling the strings of real power in the world, it's a class of plutocrats who aren't ultimately answerable to any government. This class of plutocrats uses governments like Israel, the US, the UK, and the KSA to advance its agendas to exploit, loot and plunder the rest of humanity.

11. The western empire is a cluster of tightly allied nations held together by contracts and manipulation which often function more or less as a single unit on foreign policy, war, intelligence, trade, etc.What we call Israel is functionally just the Middle Eastern disruption wing of this empire. The people in control of this alliance place no special value on Israel beyond its usefulness in advancing plutocratic agendas in the Middle East.

12. People make a big deal about Zionism in conspiracy circles, but Zionism is just one more tool of manipulation used by the elite class which only ever cares about power. The people who are actually calling the shots in this world don't care about Judaism or the Jewish people; Zionism is just a set of ideas they use to move people around. They use Christian fundamentalism, Islamic fundamentalism, white supremacy and secular liberalism in the same way. It's always about acquiring more power for the western oligarchs, and their insatiable drive in this pursuit is how they wound up at the top of the western power structure. They'll use any set of beliefs to manipulate the masses toward this end.

13. Since Israel plays such a crucial role in the agendas of the western power establishment for such a key strategic region, it should be no surprise that the people who lived on that land before Israel was dropped upon them get trampled underfoot. As far as the powerful are concerned, the Palestinians are no different from the animals whose habitats are destroyed by a new military base, or the whales that get killed by navy sonar experiments. They're a nuisance to be swatted away.

14. The reason for the extreme brutality that is being used against the Palestinian demonstrators appears to be the same as that used by the Chinese government in the Tiananmen Square massacre or the lynchings of the segregated American south: to send a message. That message is "Here is how we will deal with you whenever you hold these demonstrations." They're quashing the protests so violently and so aggressively not out of self defense, but to dissuade such protests in the future. All they have to do is be brutal enough to convince the Palestinians that such protests aren't worth the cost of life, and whole generations could be dissuaded from future protests.

15. This brutality is exposing the true face of the western empire, a trend that we are seeing all over the globe in myriad ways. Despite the best efforts of the mass media machine, people are waking up to what's really going on.

What makes this distinct self-perpetuating leniency all the more extraordinary is that even the original designation of the Palestinians as refugees ran counter to both the standard definition of this status and the international treatment of similar, if not worse, contemporary humanitarian predicaments. In contrast, the Palestinians and the Arab states have never been penalized for their “war of extermination and momentous massacre,” to use the words of Arab League secretary-general Abdul Rahman Azzam, against the nascent state of Israel. Quite the reverse, in fact. Despite U.N. secretary-general Trygve Lie’s admonition that “the United Nations could not permit that aggression to succeed and at the same time survive as an influential force for peaceful settlement, collective security, and meaningful international law,” the Palestinians and the Arab states were generously rewarded for that very aggression. The former have become the most privileged refugee group ever; the latter have been generously remunerated for hosting the displaced persons whose dispersal they caused in the first place. This unprovoked war of aggression should have ipso facto precluded the Palestinians from refugee status, should have obliged them to compensate their Jewish and Israeli victims, and should have made their rehabilitation incumbent upon their leaders and the Arab regimes as with post-World War II Germany and collaborating parties. However, it did not. In addition, their designation as refugees also failed to satisfy the internationally accepted definition of this status in several other key respects. Apart from recognizing the Palestinians as refugees despite their failure to meet the basic criteria for this status and assigning a distinct agency to tend to their affairs, the U.N. blindly registered countless false claimants as refugees despite its keen awareness of the pervasiveness of this fraud, then let their falsely obtained status be passed on to future generations. Yet rather than seek to dispel this misguided sense of victimized entitlement and steer the refugees toward rehabilitation as stipulated by its mandate, UNRWA began edging in the opposite direction. One can only hope, therefore, that as UNRWA nears its seventieth anniversary, the agency’s main donors, first and foremost the United States and the European Union, which bankroll nearly half of its budget, will find the necessary courage and integrity to acknowledge the urgency of deep reform and condition future contributions on UNRWA’s reversion to the original mandate: that is, its gradual transfer of responsibility for the Palestinian “refugees” to the Palestinian Authority and the host Arab governments, thus ending their eternal “refugeedom” and facilitating their integration in their respective societies as equal and productive citizens. This will be seventy years later than originally conceived, but better late than never. EFRAIM KARSH

The nauseating virtue signaling is sickening. The shrieks that it's a massacre. (It's always a massacre when Israel fights back. It's never a massacre when Hamas goes into Israel and murders civilians.) It's a war crime. It's a slaughter. It's a horror. Enough. Not one of these cretins has felt a fraction of the same outrage at the Passover massacre which killed 30 Israelis and wounded 140. The oldest victim was a 90-year-old woman. There's a good reason for that. They don't give a damn when Jews are murdered. Terrorist lives matter. Jewish lives don't. So let's be clear. Condemning Israel for defending itself against Hamas is... supporting Hamas. No more hiding behind concern trolling. No pretense that you're just condemning a disproportionate Israeli response. When you carry water for a Hamas attack on Israel, you support the murder of Jews. It's that simple.

As a descendent of a sankrit speaking people, uk, I am loosely termed semitic. The argument that only jews are semite relates directly to the nazi race laws implemented in the thirties. It is racist to define semitic so closely , it is therefore arguably anti semitc to even use the definition itself either way.

none of which excuses Trump and Bibi who revel in the blood they spill, they convince themselves that they look tough, however it actually reveals their weakness and powerlessness. Hence the incompetence.

violence is the final refuge of the complete incompetent. Isaac Asimov.

Awordinyourear the term was deemed useful after WWII, and it's use stifles free speech, and gives license to those who hide behind it. Huge transfer payments from Germany to Holocaust victims, which I believe are being given to another generation. We could probably safely say it will be done in perpetuity, unless the people regain control of the world

Perhaps Trump is going to be surprised at how this is going to affect his, the US's and Israel's support, not only at home, but internationally? Israel thinks this is a huge win for them. Well it is, until Trump changes him mind, or gets confronted with reality.

SOTT Editors: Are you going to keep letting Coram Deo copy-and-paste the identical comment to every article about the atrocities committed by Israel? We have read his spurious bullshit several times now, and are getting tired of it. He is obviously not only a subversive Hasbara shill and a troll, but a lazy one too, who is too stupid to say anything original with each new posting.

According to South Carolina law, criticising Israeli snipers who murder children is anti-semitism ... even if you are Jewish

I will take this as it is ... i.e. anti-semitism is about having problems with Israel and as opposed to people of Jewish faith

As such an am happy and proud to call myself anti-Semitic

Te president of the United States was allowed to address the UN and justify vaporising North Korea ... so is it so morally different to believe that the world would be better if Israel was also vaporised?

anartist Corem Deo - what a joke! A Hasbara Jew using a Latin name without any trace of shame, after the Romans expelled his ancestors from Palestine and exterminated the remainder, and razed their Temple to the ground. Typical Jew, who would sell his own mother to a pimp for 30 pieces of silver, to pose shamelessly as a Roman Catholic by using a name belonging to a murderer of his people. Why doesn't he call himself Heinrich Himmler?

anartist ".... isn't it ironic that those Palestinians being murdered are probably genetically Jewish?"

And isn't it ironic that those people calling themselves Ashkenazi Jews are genetically not Semitic at all, but a Turkic tribe from Central Asia called the Khazars, who converted to Judaism in the 9th Century? The Jew Arthur Koestler wrote his famous book on the subject, The Thirteenth Tribe," which the Ashkenazim who run Israel hate with a passion.

They have no right, as converts to Judaism, to the land which has belonged to the Semitic people, such as the Palestinians, since 2,000 years ago. It would be as if the Muslim Uighurs of Western China, converts to Islam, should claim themselves to be genetically Arabs, and steal the land of Saudi Arabia and all its oil, as rightfully theirs as Muslims who emigrated from Arabia. Utter bullshit.

"...the pernicious mind virus which makes people think it's okay to promote hatred against Jewish people.." Agreed. Absolutely. There are uncounted numbers of very fine people among the Jews. Even among the Israelis. Daniel Barenboim, the Israeli conductor, is a shining example of what a Jew should be. A great humanist, a great peacemaker, a great man.

However, the Jewish religion has long been subverted, which has caused the Jews thousands of years of suffering. Pharisaical Judaism began with the exile to Babylon in 586 BC, at which time the Torah and the other books of the Jewish Old Testament began to be written down, which before had been only oral traditions. When the Jews were again expelled from Israel by the Romans, many of them returned to Babylon, and the Pharisees became the religious leaders of the Diaspora. THEY then began composing the man-made, so-called Babylonian Talmud, which has now expanded to 63 volumes of religious dogma, often directly contradicting the Torah and its moral codes, by convoluted legal contortions and distortions of language. For example, the Talmud condones sexual relations by adults of any age with children as young as three years old, by rationalizing that they have no awareness of sexuality. I am not making this up.

The Talmud is one of the most foul, vile, hateful, vicious and bloodthirsty bodies of filth ever composed by human beings, and THIS today has become the dogma of so-called "Judaism" which is embraced by the Zionists. It argues against all the tenets of the Torah or Old Testament, and sets Man up as superior in intelligence and argumentative ability to God Himself. The Talmud says that non-Jews are animals, their children are mere beasts, God is pleased at the death of a Goy, Jews are permitted to murder, steal from, and deceive Goyim, Mary was a whore who slept with hundreds of men, Jesus' spirit is in Hell for all eternity where he is being cooked forever in a vat of boiling shit, and countless more so-called Laws.

On the soul of my dead mother, I swear all this is true.

Therefore, what provokes the hatred towards Jews, and has done so in every single country they have ever lived in, under every religion including Paganism, for thousands of years, is NOT their race, but their religious beliefs as expounded in the Talmud, and as observed by those people calling themselves "Jews."

Today, the Talmud and its vicious, remorseless, pitiless hatred of all non-Jews has supplanted the Torah in every synagogue, and most especially in the land of "Israel." THIS is why people hate Jews - because of the beliefs they adhere to, and which express themselves in their treatment of the Palestinians. As I said in the beginning, even though Israel defines a Jew as a racial identity and calls itself the Jewish State - the only nation in the modern world to define its citizens by their race - what people object to is the individual members of that race individually claiming adherence to the tenets of the Jewish religion as expounded in the Talmud by their "Rabbis," who are schooled and versed in the tenets of the Talmud, and preach them to all the members in their congregations. A Jew who repudiated the Talmud and its filthy hateful dogma, and the actions of the Israeli Government proceeding therefrom, would have no problem in the world. Many Jews, such as Norman Finkelstein, do in fact repudiate these tenets, and are respected by all non-Jews, but arouse violent hatred against them among other Jews who follow the Zionist Talmud.

So, it is NOT the race we hate, it is their religious beliefs and their actions proceeding therefrom.